The FBI’s predawn arrest of self-proclaimed “dirty trickster” and longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone on Friday brings the total number of President Donald Trump’s advisers and officials charged by the Mueller probe to six.
According to the indictment, which deserves to be read in its entirety, Stone is charged with seven counts of criminal activity, including one count of obstruction of an official proceeding, five counts of making false statements and one count of “witness tampering.”
Yet none of those charges fully conveys the seriousness of the allegations and the threat, if proven true, Stone and his associates posed to free and fair elections in 2016, and, by extension, America’s 242-year-old experiment in democracy.
As nearly every American knows by now, special counsel Robert Mueller was appointed in May 2017 by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to “oversee the previously confirmed FBI investigation of Russian government efforts to influence the 2016 presidential election and related matters.”
All seven of the charges against Stone strike to the core of Russian interference, since they involve his alleged attempts to hide his efforts to gather information regarding hacked emails potentially damaging to the Clinton campaign.
U.S. officials have repeatedly stated, and indeed this was the basis for launching the Mueller probe, that Russian intelligence agents were responsible for hacking Hillary Clinton’s and other Democrats’ email accounts and then giving them to WikiLeaks for public consumption. Moreover, the indictment alleges that Stone sought to obtain information about the hacked emails at the direction of unidentified “senior Trump Campaign officials.”
The threats by Stone quoted in the indictment as proof of “witness tampering,” aimed at an unidentified individual, are perhaps the most shocking. When that individual said in an email that Stone should be “honest” with the FBI, Stone replied, “You are a rat. A stoolie. You backstab your friends-run your mouth my lawyers are dying (sic) Rip you to shreds.” Stone later wrote to that same individual saying, “Prepare to die (expletive).”
Some on the left seem to relish the idea that those closest to the president — if not the president himself — could face similar indictments. While some on the right seem to agree with the president that the Mueller probe is nothing but a “witch hunt” and think the special counsel long ago overstepped his bounds.
This latter view is often accompanied by claims that any threat to our fundamental democratic values or the credibility of our electoral process has been exaggerated for political gain. But when the president’s advisers are being indicted for covering up investigations into foreign interference in a U.S. election and intimidating those who would cooperate with the official assigned to lead that investigation, we are in dangerous and uncharted territory.
Painting this as politics as usual won’t diminish what is clearly a disturbing affront to any sense of democratic fair play and possibly a crime against the spirit and letter of this nation’s federal and nonfederal election laws.
That a foreign national or agency might have helped one candidate defeat another for our nation’s highest office is a matter no American should take lightly, regardless of political affiliation.
As more indictments are handed down, Democrats and Republicans alike should have the strength to follow the truth wherever it leads.
— The Dallas Morning News
